Each unit can be configured with upto 10 independent 8Gb FC
ports for a total data transfer rate of 8 GBytes / sec. Ports can be
mixed - with the previously available (and 25% faster)
InfiniBand.

Editor's
comments:- prior to the launch I spoke to Jamon Bowen,
Director of Sales Engineering for TMS - and learned a lot about the internal
design and architecture of this SSD which the company has never revealed
before.

Firstly - on the business front -
fibre-channel SAN SSDs -
which the company has been selling for over 10 years - still accounts for the
majority of their SSD business. And their primary market is customers who have
legacy applications
(rather than new dynasty) that they want to run faster. In the
who
is your customer? debate - Jamon said their main customers are the
applications owners rather than the infrastructure people - but he said when you
bring a solution to your customer it still has to tick all the boxes and work
with the existing software (mainly Oracle) and hardware that's already in
place. Latency, throughput and reliability are the key features in this market.

In the past TMS hasn't talked much about the details of its designs.
But Holly Frost who founded the company 33 years ago - and who still
plays an active part in steering the electronic designs in the company - has
decided that it's a good idea to talk more about the internals of their products
- to demonstrate their leadership and show why their products can work better
than others.

My notes below summarize what I learned in an hour of
conversation. I asked Jamon if he could follow this up later with a more
detailed whitepaper. In the past TMS kept their SSD design details
confidential to stop competitors learning how they had solved performance
problems.

The best way to think about the RamSan-630 - is as a
router (or communications
pipe) which is designed to transfer data at high speed and low latency from the
host network interface to and from the flash memory array which has 14Gbytes/s
usable bandwidth. The typical 3U box includes 26 powerPC processors and 1,600
flash memory chips. The
architecture on the motherboard comes from the company's
DSP and
array processing roots.
The on-board processors connect to the flash array via a very fast serially
connected non blocking cross-bar switch matrix.

To maximize the
flash I/O performance seen by the host servers - TMS's FC HBAs use its
own design of ASICs instead of 3rd party chips. Each HBA has an
FPGA
which does block management in raw hardware - as well as a fast local processor
- which handles the niceties such as error management. These HBAs have DMA
access to the flash SSD array - and are designed so that multiple ports can
operate together to provide a single faster virtual connection.

That's
where you start to understand the performance differences between this TMS
product and other FC SAN SSDs. Because in most other FC SSD systems the "SSD
box" is really a conventional server with
industry standard HBAs.
It's impossible for those products to achieve the same low latencies and
sustained throughput - even though the datasheet or benchmark specs might
suggest that aggregate numbers are similar. Of course - all this hardware comes
at a cost. And the
silicon intensive nature of
the TMS designs means that - part of the design cost has to be amortized in
each unit - in a similar way to what happens in the
merchant SSD controller
market. Because you have to pay the wages of the talent. - When I said
that Jamon laughed and said - don't forget you've got to pay for the marketers
and sales people too.

As usual - when I talk to SSD companies - our
time slot overran - and I learned some new stuff - as part of my ongoing unique
one on one industry funded
private SSD
education course. I hope he made it to his flight.

There will always be a
market for these high speed SSD accelerators in the
SAN - because the
alternative is delivering data late.

Are you trying to shortlist flash SSD accelerators according to
comparative benchmark tests?

If so a new article -
the 3 fastest PCIe
SSDs list (or is it really lists?) may help to take some of the
pressure off you. Hmm... you may be thinking that StorageSearch's editor never
gives easy answers to SSD questions if more complicated ones are available.

But in this case you'd be
wrong. (I didn't say you'd like the answers, though.) ...read the article

The
Top 50 SSD
articles is a monthly updated list of the most popular SSD articles
viewed by our readers with abstracts.

No-one (apart from
me and
Google's
spider bot) has got time to read the thousands of SSD articles on this
site.

A simple list of popular SSD articles used to appear from time
to time in the
SSD market research
pages. But the title of an article and its rank don't tell you enough about
whether an article will be worthwhile for you.

The problem is
- a very popular article which may suit an SSD newbie (with thousands of
external links pointing to it) may be less interesting to experienced SSD
readers than a newer currently obscure article which is ranked further down
the list.